Tag: schools

Empower those around you, and everyone thrives

The large amount of online resources built to enhance student learning is staggering. There’s no dearth in what can be implemented. Instead, the hurdle to teachers adopting new best practices is actually trifold:

  1. Lack of time
  2. Lack of communication
  3. Lack of confidence

Time is a person’s most valuable resource. When dividing a day between eating, sleeping, being with loved ones, and earning money, it’s difficult to learn new things. Responsibilities pile up pretty quickly for adults, and this means less time to explore unfamiliar territory.

Communication has traditionally been poor throughout many schools and school districts. There are a myriad of reasons why this is. In my opinion, a major reason is because a lot of people feel more comfortable going it alone. Collaboration and transparency get the heart beating quickly–better to stay an island.

Confidence grows when you’ve had time to learn something and experience success. Some walk around with false bravado, but most of us appreciate exposure to new curriculum and technology before confidence and mastery appear.

I believe one of the best ways to enhance student learning is by giving teachers more time, better ways to communicate, and helping them gain mastery over technology (which, for me, is synonymous with curriculum) and instructional best practices so they are confident.

That sounds really nice, but how is this accomplished?

Professional development (PD) can initially be daunting and expensive, but every school district has the ability to build effective professional development sessions. Coordinators just have to start with one idea in mind: crowdsourcing.

It’s important to unpack “crowdsourcing” before moving forward. I’m using the word in the following way (my definition): “Contributing to the collective good by outsourcing work within your tribe so everyone benefits.” To crowdsource in education, you build capacity within fellow teachers who in turn create passionate edtech niches and share that passion and knowledge with everyone in their school or district.

Boom! That’s it. Instead of paying consultants to come in and blah, blah, blah about something teachers have heard over and over, pay teachers to seek out best practices, learn them, harness them, and share them with as many people as possible. The money is staying within the district and local community, and a sustainable network of motivated people can teach colleagues. (If you’re wondering about the nuts and bolts of this human infrastructure, check out what I wrote here.)

And don’t let this be forgotten: Motivated people are necessary because they continue learning. We need individuals who will learn, teach, learn again, teach, and so on because everything is in flux. The need for continual PD has never been so important, and there’s no way for one person to know everything. To create institutions of learning that actually foster learning, everyone needs to evolve. If you’re not getting stronger, you’re getting weaker. If you’re not learning new things, your knowledge base is dwindling.

Recently, my school district put the above into action. In one day we offered twenty-two 50-minute sessions taught by teachers within our school district. Attendees picked five of the sessions they thought would be the most helpful. We named the event PBVCon, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Why did a majority of teachers like it?

  1. They had time to choose their own path of learning. Autonomy is a powerful thing.
  2. They communicated with knowledgeable presenters with skin in the game, and they communicated with each other.
  3. Their levels of confidence grew. Perhaps not to an extravagant degree, but there was definitely an increase in the belief: “I can do this!”

Time, communication, and confidence. Crowdsourcing, which is just another version of the age-old technique called “jigsawing,” is the most powerful method schools and districts can adopt in order to help students.

Empower those around you, and everyone thrives.

Fragile, robust, antifragile (with pictures!)

Once you think in terms of antifragility, you start to view education–and life–in new ways. Because I find the concept so important, I try to explain it to anyone who will listen. Medicine, business, politics, international affairs, education, and pretty much every other field can benefit from an understanding of antifragility. Yesterday I was telling a coworker about all of the concept’s benefits, and she added, ‘It’s important for marriages, too.’ I think it’s important in all areas of life. I could go on and on about how an antifragile philosophy can be beneficial in a multitude of ways, but as usual, I’ll focus on education. Here’s another go at explaining what Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined in the book Antifragile, with pictures I recently drew:

FRAGILE

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Think of an egg. You drop it on the ground, and it looks like this:

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That’s fragility; introduce a little force or instability, and destruction soon follows. Fragility should be avoided at all costs: fragile investments, fragile jobs, fragile people… the list goes on.

What does fragility look like in education? Intervention just for the sake of intervention. Unsustainable 1:1 deployments. Rigid adherence to curriculum. Lack of training. Implementation of (big) ‘Systems’. Teachers isolated in classrooms. Spending money on programs, training, and technology that isn’t helpful. Unneeded hierarchy and bureaucracy. A narrow understanding how to increase student learning.

ROBUST
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Think of a bowling ball. You drop it on a tile kitchen floor, and it looks like this:
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That’s robustness. introduce a little force or instability, and the object, person, organization, etc. isn’t affected. ‘It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.’ Obviously, this is much more ideal than fragility; it’s where the bumper sticker ‘Tough times go away; tough people don’t’ comes into play.

What does robustness look like in education? A program that can keep functioning with a lack of funds. Lesson plans that are effective year to year. A 1:1 deployment the district can maintain in regards to maintenance and training. A well-rounded understanding of how students learn. A district that is financially stable. Quick reaction to unforeseen events.

ANTIFRAGILE
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Think of Hydra. You remember Hydra? When you cut off one of its heads, two more sprout back in its place, like this:
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That’s antifragility; introduce a little force or instability, and the object, person, organization, etc. becomes stronger. Think of it: Does chaos or conflict make our international relations stronger? Does instability make your job stronger? If you’re an architect, does force make your building stronger or weaker?

What does antifragility look like in education? It’s a 1:1 deployment where the devices can be used in new and interesting ways when the Wi-Fi is down. It’s not having to be reactionary. It’s teachers who think quickly on their feet and provide engaging lesson plans, even in the midst of a lock-down. It’s principals who come up with amazing programs, activities, and training sessions on a shoestring budget. It’s districts who thrive in times of financial hardship. It’s students who enjoy fixing technology in their classrooms and view broken devices as challenges and learning experiences. It’s a district or school who, like Hydra, becomes stronger, smarter, and more experienced during times where other districts and schools crumble.

I recommend examining your school and district and determining where it’s fragile, robust, and antifragile. I also encourage you to examine your life and see which areas can be moved to the robust or antifragile side of the spectrum. You’ll be doing yourself, and those you love, a huge favor.

Technology = Curriculum

After the advent of the printing press, the “mass produced” books were considered a form of technology. Today, a traditionally bound book is not regularly accepted as technology. The same goes for the pen, pencil, eraser, pencil sharpener, and many other common supplies. There was a time when pens that held ink were a novelty and treasure. Now they’re ubiquitous and cheap.

In education we split technology and curriculum into two separate departments. Pens, pencils, erasers are materials that fall directly in the curriculum department, whereas hardware, software, programming, and web design belong solely to the tech team.

It would be wonderful if the two spheres merged, so that in the education field, technology and curriculum became synonymous. In this hypothetical, creating a website and populating it with effective resources would be done by people in the same department. The creation of units, lesson plans, and materials would be done by the same educators who write code and attend the CUE Conference.

And let’s just call it all the “curriculum” department. After all, technology changes. A laptop may one day be as disposable as a pencil, but student learning will always remain important.